Welcome Professor Eric De Barros!

It seems only fitting that my final blog post for the English Department be to welcome someone who will be coming in to the department as I leave:  Professor Eric De Barros. As Senior Representative to the Chair, I had the pleasure of getting to take Professor De Barros on a tour of campus with Nick, our Junior Representative to the Chair, and to have pizza with him and various graduate and undergraduate English students. I was very excited when I learned Professor De Barros would be joining the Department and even more excited when he agreed to answer some questions for the blog.

Professor De Barros

Where did you attend college?

I’m a proud graduate of the University of Virginia (UVa).

How did you decide you wanted to have a career in academia?

I decided the first month or so of college. I’d always done well enough in school and enjoyed History and English.  However, because of the very practical and materialistic understanding of education that I took to college, I assumed I would do something that made economic sense to my family and community, something like law or medicine.  As I said, that all changed early in my first year of college, when I experienced how seriously my literature and philosophy professors took their disciplines. Somehow I had no idea that someone could make a career out of studying literature or other complex ideas. I loved everything about it—the reading, the research, the interpreting, especially the argumentative writing—and just went with it. 

What is your area of research?

My area of research is early modern (mainly sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century) English literature with an emphasis in educational theory and practice.  More specifically, I examine how early modern educational theorists and literary figures variously confront the tension between the body and discourse or nature and culture to re-think categories of embodied subjectivity such as race, gender, and sexuality.  

What do you like to do when you are not teaching/researching?

When I’m not teaching/researching, I’m spending time with my wife and daughter. 

      Who has most impacted your academic life and how so?

I’d have to say the late Richard Helgerson. I had an opportunity to study with him at UC, Santa Barbara for about two years early in my graduate education. More than any other scholar-teacher, he modeled for me that a commitment to students and a love for the classroom were not incompatible with research excellence.    

What is your favorite text? Why?

I’ve enjoyed way too many texts to select one as my favorite. However, I will say that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was particularly pivotal to my early intellectual development. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time when I was about thirteen and was profoundly struck by the idea that complex, creative expression is itself a revolutionary act. After the protagonist, Winston Smith, begins his diary, a “thoughtcrime” punishable by death, he unearths the complex range of emotions and fragmented memories that the state has systematically attempted to destroy. Those emotions and memories initially come back to him in the form of a dream, during which he vaguely remembers things like familial loyalty, maternal love, and erotic desire. He wakes up from that dream with “Shakespeare” on his lips.  In other words, in an anti-intellectual, authoritarian world, the emotional richness of Shakespearean expression is nothing short of revolutionary. Though at the time I didn’t understand it as such, Nineteen Eighty-Four provided me a compelling defense of literary studies that perhaps explains the ease with which I was able to accept and follow my interest in literary studies in college.

What are you most looking forward to next semester when you will be teaching here at Clark?

I look forward to everything, but especially the teaching. Once I’m done with this semester at SUNY Oswego, I will begin to develop the two courses I’ll be teaching in the Fall: Major British Writers I and Advanced Shakespeare. In both instances, I plan to engage students in a historicist, gender studies examination of a number of texts. More specifically, in the first course, I’m thinking of having my students examine selections from a range of texts— literary, educational, medical, military, travel, etc. — in the interest of developing a nuanced understanding of and appreciation for the complex ways in which gender— specifically masculinity—gets constructed. For the Shakespeare course, I plan to focus this critical orientation on what I term “the pedagogy of sexual violence.”  As a product of a grammar school education, Shakespeare inherited a classical tradition rife with scenes of male-defining violence and specifically violence against women. As I’m thinking about it, one of the governing questions for this course will be, “Why and how did Shakespeare, the most famous product of such a tradition, variously and creatively explore and even critique 'the pedagogy of sexual violence'?” I’m still thinking through both courses, but I’m really excited to explore these types of issues with Clark students. 

What advice would you give to any college student?

I guess the most important thing is don’t reduce your education (the major you end up declaring) to an uninspired matter of technical training deemed most employable or lucrative.  Follow what you enjoy doing—what you love, what you’re passionate about, what you would do for free—and then figure out how to get paid doing it or something as close to it as possible. You may or may not get rich this way, but you will definitely increase your chances of living a happy and fulfilled life.

Welcome to Clark, Professor De Barros! We are all excited to have you here next semester!